Shift Happens
Impasse is the place where creativity flourishes.
Published on October 23, 2013 by Katherine Ramsland in Shadow Boxing
One of the delights of watching the twisty plots on Breaking Bad is seeing the creative spark emerge when all seems lost. For example, Jesse, under arrest for knowing a child was poisoned, flashes on a way out: he "must have seen it on House, yo." When the team had to steal a laptop from a locked evidence room or were stranded in the desert without water or a means to get help, an aha! moment solved the problem.
Quite often on this show, they engage in a powerful creative process that I call snaps. I’ve even given a TED talk on the subject. I picked up the formula from a 19th-century engineer, Henri Poincaré, who was a mathematical savant and the father of chaos theory. He was also the first scientist to articulate how and when “aha!” insights most often occurred.
Poincaré was a mining inspector in northeastern France. After he was invited to become a lecturer at Caen University, he remained chief engineer of the Corps de Mines. This change of venue provided fertile ground for sudden insight.
His most famous brainstorm occurred when he was working on differential equations. One day, he’d reached a frustrating impasse, so he went on a geologic excursion. On the morning he was to leave, he went to the bus stop. The bus arrived, the door opened, and he lifted his foot to step inside. Out of nowhere, he had the elusive solution, fully formed.
“As I put my foot on the step,” he wrote, “the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it.” He felt complete certainty about it, so much so that he got on the bus, sat down with a companion, and continued their conversation without taking notes. On his return, he verified the result.
Poincaré asserted that the best way to work out a complex problem is to first immerse in it until you hit an impasse. Then distract yourself.
In a lecture in 1908 to a group of psychologists, he described his ideas about the creative spark. He told them how he’d striven for two weeks to prove that “Fuchsian functions” could not exist. He'd sat at his worktable each day for an hour, maybe two. Nothing worked. Then one evening, he'd changed his regular habits and had a cup of coffee, which gave him a case of insomnia.
“Ideas rose in crowds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination. I had only to write out the results, which took but a few hours.” He believed that the stimulant had made him more present to the material.
Comparing these subconsciously ideas to atoms, Poincaré said, “During a period of apparent rest and unconscious work, certain of them come unhooked from the wall and put in motion. They flash in every direction through the space where they are enclosed... Then their mutual impacts may produce new combinations.”
Conscious work was needed, he said, in order to unhook them from the wall, but it could go only so far. Then the rest of the brain had to get involved. For the psychologists, Poincaré listed five distinct points:
Creativity that produces insight begins with a period of deeply immersed conscious work, followed by unconscious work. Then the unconscious work must be verified, i.e., put on a “firm footing.” Third, one had to trust the “delicate intuition” of the unconscious, which “knows better how to divine than the conscious self, since it succeeds where that has failed.”
For the fourth point, he stated that the unconscious mind could present an unfruitful direction that was nevertheless elegant, so the conscious mind had to decide on its usefulness. Fifth, whatever the unconscious mind does present is only a “point of departure.” The rest can be worked out with the more logical conscious mind.
Thus, the best way to inspire an effective aha! insight with compelling momentum is to diligently work within the parameters of a goal-oriented problem, then relax and let the brain play with the elements to which it has already been exposed.
The impasse, as frustrating as it may feel, is an important part of the process. That's when the brain signals that it can shift to a new strategy. Relaxing the left brain's effort clears the mind and allows for the snap! of a breakthrough that has already incubated. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/shadow-boxing/201310/shift-happens
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